Seminar: Analysing Constraint Grammar with SAT (I. Listenmaa, 2017-02-08)

In this talk, I present a method and a tool for analysing Constraint Grammar. With this tool, we can find contradictions or suboptimal ordering in a grammar: a rule or a rule set may block another rule from ever applying, or a rule may have an internal conflict. What’s the news here? You could always use a corpus to find out: run all the rules, and if some rule never applies, maybe there’s something wrong with it. But it may also be that the right sentence to trigger the rule just wasn’t in the corpus. We avoid the uncertainty and scrap the corpus entirely. Instead, we model the space of all possible analyses as SAT-clauses, and /create/ the sentence by applying all the rules — or find a conflict in the rules, if the SAT-solver cannot create such a sentence. During my visit, I’ve been adapting this method for the Basque grammar developed at the IXA group. After a general presentation of the method, I’ll talk about my progress with Basque. (If the time allows, I will show a sneak peek of my hobby project, Basque grammar in Grammatical Framework: https://github.com/inariksit/GF-eus) — Short bio Inari Listenmaa is a PhD student at the University of Gothenburg. She has worked with rule-based grammar formalisms, especially Grammatical Framework and Constraint Grammar. She’ll be here until the end of February, so if you’re interested in any of these topics, come and visit her in office 314.